Juniper And Thorn Quotes

My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one ever told me I was allowed to scream

I almost laughed. “You would rather me eat your heart than look away in disgust?” “Of course,” he breathed. “Every time.

You let me eat up all papa’s anger so it wouldn’t poison you. you didn’t mind that he ruined me as long as you were unspoiled and safe. If you ever loved me, it was because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.

Well, you’re my first secret then, my first lie. Does that please you?” “Only if it pleases you.

They are not terrible. They are just the truth.

Don’t you see? You can take my heart and liver; split open my belly and eat what’s inside. I would sooner bear it than lose you to those who would call you plain-faced, who makes you kneel and kiss their feet. Do not leave me alone. Do not leave me to lick my wounds like a dog before it’s put down. Do not look at the truth of me and then look away. Please, Marlinchen.

My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.

You should know, of course, that there are only two kinds of mothers in stories, and if you are a mother, you are either wicked or you are dead.

I am not afraid of your father’s anger. I am afraid of his gentleness.” “What?” Sevas looked down. “Even Derkach was capable of kindness. You heard him say that he loves me. Any predator can choose to smile without teeth.

You know the truth, Ms. Vashchenko. What you want is the courage to believe it.

It filled me with a terrible pity and guilt, so perfunctory it was as if I'd been made for it, a machine for dispensing grief.

Magic is the first sip of good wine that makes the edges of your vision blur. Magic is the cool breeze of the boardwalk at night and organ music in the air. Magic is landing a grand jeté and nearly going deaf with hate crowd's applause. Magic is the low flicker of tavern lights and the girl your courting leaning close so you can kiss.

Wanting anything ended only in misery.

The juniper tree looked as stolid as a grave marker, unruffled. Under the dirt was the compact and inside the compact was the black sand and in every grain of sand was Sevas, my first secret, my first lie, safe as death.

It's the oldest story there is, men wanting things that will kill them.

But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry.

Princes didn’t come for women; they only came for girls with intact and immaculate maidenheads, opening them up like flowers waiting to be plucked.

Most of the wizards in Oblya took mortal women as their brides, due to the fact that witches have a tendency to become wickeder when they become wives. Some, I had heard, even grew a second set of sharp teeth and ate their husbands.

When I blinked again, though, he was Sevas, just Sevas, and I began to weep for how utterly and helplessly I loved him.

what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.

Stories weren't meant to be questioned; they were answers in and of themselves. They were meant to preempt any question you might ever have, to steal the words right from your mouth. If you were a third daughter your fate was written out before you even drew your first breath. If you thought to ask why certain plums were suffused with poison, well, you might as well be a loathsome scientist. If you began to wonder how a wizard came to own his tower, you were a capitalist, with viperous schemes behind your eyes. Who else would ever dream of asking why?

He believed me, I could tell, or at least he wanted to. I wanted desperately to believe myself. It was better than the alternative: that the ghost of the girl I was still haunted these halls, and she would posses me whenever my body ached like a wound that would let her slip inside. Perhaps she would never let me go.

You are insufferable sometimes. You're not doing me, or yourself, any favors by pretending not to mind when you get hurt. I would have slapped you harder if I didn't know the truth--if I didn't know that you would just blush and bat your lashes as someone tied a tourniquet around your thigh and prepared to saw your leg off. Do you know why the worst thing Papa has ever done to me is push me to my knees? Because I wail and the scream and beat his chest with my fists whenever he tries to do anything more than bark orders at me from the chaise. You think he wants some mute little china doll to cook his meals and wash his sheets? No. He wants daughters with teeth. The hurting is the point. I can't believe it's taken you twenty-three years to figure out--if you even understand what I'm saying at all. It's no fun stamping through old dirty snow. People want to ruin things that are clean and new... He can't stand the idea of anyone spoiling us but him.

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called "sage brush" appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

Mags said magic invited a certain amount of mess. That's why the honeysuckle grew three times as large around her house, and birds nested in her eaves no matter the season. In New Salem—the City Without Sin, where the trolleys run on time and every street wears a Saint’s name—the only birds are pigeons and the only green is the faint shine of slime in the gutters. A trolley jangles past several inches from Juniper’s toes and its driver swears at her. Juniper swears back. She keeps going because there’s no place to stop. There are no mossy stumps or blue pine groves; every corner and stoop is filled up with people. Workers and maids, priests and officers, men with pocket-watches and ladies with big hats and children selling buns and newspapers and shriveled up flowers. Juniper tries asking directions twice but the answers are baffling, riddle-like (follow St. Vincent’s to Fourth-and-Withdrop, cross the Thorn, and head straight). Within an hour she’s been invited to a boxing match, accosted by a gentleman who wants to discuss the relationship between the equinox and the end-times, and given a map that has nothing marked on it but thirty-nine churches. Juniper stares down at the map, knotted and foreign and unhelpful, and wants to go the hell home.

We have lived in Oblya before it was even Oblya... When there was only the long, flat steppe that fell into the sea with nothing to stop it. Since the days of the bogatyrs and their gods, when you couldn't pass by a stream without rusalka calling to you sweetly, when you left your third-born sons in the woods for the leshy, and when you prayed in four directions to please the domovoi that lived in the cupboard.

Almost all stories begin with a happy couple: a rich man and his beautiful, pious wife. If they have daughters, it is generally a sign that something will go wrong. Daughters usually have a bad time in stories, especially if there are three or more. I think this is my favorite story because everything goes right, when it's all said and done. And it's not such a bad thing to a bird, if you can find someone to kiss you back into a girl. My mother's problem was that all the bogatyrs are gone.

The stories tended to give your three chances for these sorts of things. Three nights of revelry before your carriage turned into a gourd. Three questions to ask the wolf before he showed his teeth. Three bites of an apple before you ate the poison in it. I could mete out my three chances carefully, savoring them like caramels; I could suck on them and spit them out again into my hand. Even the imagining of it felt thrilling and tasted sweet.

Do you know what I would do to everyone who ever called you plain-faced?" Sevas panted, lips brushing the shell of my ear. "I would kill them.

The grandfather clock gonged three. Papa spoke a word that sounded like a spell, though I couldn't be sure. It was neither kind nor cruel. It was simply a wheel going into its grooves. All I knew then was that I was falling through time, years opening up into a black abyss that swallowed me whole. When they spit me out I was sixteen again, Dr. Bakay's hands on my budding breasts; I was thirteen, eating my bird-mother for supper; I was elven and Papa was dragging me down the stairs and into the foyer so I could tell fortunes for men with lust in their eyes. I was nine and lying awake at night at Papa's footsteps made the wood ache and groan.

If I have you it will be as a man has a woman, a husband his wife. Do you dream of Bogatyr Ivan when you kiss me? Do you wish I entered you while holding a wooden sword? I would not like any story to lie between us like a third body in our marriage bed. When I touch your breast I am touching the breast of Marlinchen Vashchenko, not a witch, not a swan-girl, not a flesh diviner, not a third daughter. Even I am not near lusty enough to satisfy five women at once.

Any predator can choose to smile without teeth.

Although Papa's moments of kindness were so rare, so meager, they ballooned so hugely in my mind that sometimes they obliterated everything else.

They say he’s the youngest principal dancer in any Rodinyan ballet company, ever,” she said. “Only twenty-one. That’s so sad, isn’t it?” “Why is it sad?” “Because,” she said, “what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.

I couldn't even imagine what it would be, and that - the unknowing - terrified me to my marrow.

What do you do when you're twenty-one and you've already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.

Magic was always like that: it had ugly undersides. Wanting anything was a trap.

But there's hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn't make somebody angry.

It wasn't that I was so scared of red-bellied snakes and centipedes; they were harmless, I knew that much. I was more afraid that every time I walked through the garden, I was trampling hundreds of living things without even realizing it.

It's no fun stamping through old dirty snow. People want to ruin things that are clean and new.

But there was another part of me that wanted to scream his name through empty hallways so I could hear the way it echoed. I wanted to whisper it into the ear of every person I ever met; I wanted to burn it onto me like a brand. i wanted, most of all, for someone to steal the wretched, awful burden of it away from me, and to explain precisely how wretched and awful it was. I wanted someone to write it down like a story in Papa's codex so I could know what lesson there was to be learned.

Once you turned into one thing, you could no longer be what you once were. A cat turned into a cat-vase lost its whiskers and darting pink tongue. A carriage turned into a gourd lost its wheels and glass windows. And once you became a woman, you gave up all the trappings of girlhood, all its precious bounties.

And what was a story except a berry you ate over and over again, until your lips and tongue were red and every word you spoke was poison?

If you ever loved me, it was only because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.

Stories weren't meant to be questioned; they were answers in and of themselves. They were meant to preempt any question you might ever have, to steal the words right from your mouth.

I had always thought of my body as something that needed to be tackled and brawled, pelted and pinned down and bruised into submission, then trussed up like a chicken and laced into a whalebone corset.